ORIGINALLY POSTED JAN 2021. UPDATED JAN 2025.
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I LOVE hot pot! I love eating it in restaurants and I love eating it at home.
In restaurants it’s a lot more convenient (tons of ingredient options, you get a more accurate quantity of ingredients to the table, no clean-up or equipment requirement lol), but at home it’s so cozy and warm and equally delicious (plus you generally get lots of leftovers which is a good thing when it comes to home hot pot).
I initially wrote this blog in the early days of the pandemic to share how much I missed hot pot restaurant dining due to pandemic restrictions. It felt timely then to share a little guide for how people can Hot Pot at Home (because it’s not that hard to do!) and since writing the guide I feel like I’ve referenced it and shared it each year because it’s something we tend to do at home throughout the year but particularly during the cold winter months.
Mike and I have been ‘doing’ Home Hot Pot for our New Year’s Eve celebrations for many years now, it’s become a delicious traditional (I’d recommend it!)
We often miscalculate the amount of ingredients we need for home hot pot so we end up doing hot pot for two additional lunches and dinners (lol! I’m a proponent for too much food and leftovers than not enough food and no leftovers so this is always a great thing actually).
As I realized I had never blogged about home hot pot before, and ended up getting a fair bit of questions about what hot pot is after I posted on social media, what better thing to do than to blog about it here and help you Hot Pot from Home!
How to Hot Pot From Home
A useful and not overly complex guide for what it is and what you need in order to have it at home.
What is Hot Pot?
For simplicity’s sake, I often describe hot pot as “Asian fondue” and better than regular fondue (lol). While regular fondue I feel tends to be more dessert-y, and you wouldn’t really eat or drink the fondue sauce, with Chinese hot pot, you can very much (and should) slurp up the soup-based broth that cooks the meats, seafood, and vegetables! Hot pot is a more savoury-focused cook-your-own meal in a pot than Western fondue! It’s essentially going for delicious Asian soup—and you’re just in charge of “building” your bowl.
Simply put: hot pot is cooking your own ingredients in a pot that is hot. The name for the meal describes a cooking method as well as the food experience you’re going to have. The pot is filled with broth that boils and it’s that boiled broth that cooks different ingredients you add to the pot throughout the meal.
There’s a lot of interesting history to Chinese hot pot. For instance, it is said to have originated over 1,000 years ago, created by Mongol warriors who “camped outside and had dinner together circled around a pot on the fire—it was a way to keep warm, while eating at the same time” (source: Hot Pot Ambassador).
It may also be referred to as ‘steamboat’ or ‘shabu shabu’—which are similar concepts (cook ingredients in a hot soup-based pot) but have slightly different techniques and origins.
Chinese hot pot is also considered a communal, community-focused meal. Growing up, my family would go for hot pot and as a child, I’d often share my pot with my parents and siblings. It’s common in hot pot dining to cook your ingredients in a communal pot. That’s how it started, though modern hot pot and restaurants these days offer individual hot pots or split pots (often called Lovers Pots). Individual pots make a lot of sense because you can really individualize your hot pot experience—the sauces you use, the meats, seafoods, and vegetables you put into your pot, these are all aspects of hot pot that should be very unique to each person. This is also better for dietary needs or food preferences—you can build your pot the way you want/need it.
- Check out this amazing history of hot pot written by Tingwei Zhang:
- Chinese Hot Pot: a Communal Food Culture (Dec 23, 2019)
When I introduced my husband Mike to hot pot, and we shared a pot, he initially hated it because I put in so much seafood in my pot, he was put off by the fishy flavour. Eventually we tried the “Lovers Hot Pot”—pots with a divider down the middle so you can have two types of broths in one, ensuring each person gets to make their broth and pot their own, to their specific tastes. This divided individual pot is what we use when we hot pot at home. In restaurants, if given the option for one communal pot or individual pots, we pick individual to ensure we are each getting our preferred ingredients, broth, flavour, overall better experience!
What Do You Need To Hot Pot At Home?
The first thing you need to ensure before you Hot Pot at Home is that you’ve got time for the experience. Truly, lol. Hot pot isn’t a quick meal. It takes time to cook your ingredients. It takes time to eat and enjoy what you’ve cooked. And then it takes time to repeat the process. You can’t just dump all your ingredients in the pot at once.
It’s a thoughtful cooking process with varying factors—some ingredients take longer to cook (noodles for instance), some food you want to eat right away, some ingredients you like to have just a few bites of while others you ensure you make seconds, thirds, and sometimes even fourth servings for.
There’s also prep work involved in hot pot at home—washing, cutting, assembling all the ingredients takes time. Plus the clean-up that occurs after.
And if you think back to that communal, community aspect to hot pot, you also need to consider incorporating time to socialize with those you’ve chosen to hot pot with, the intimate hot pot home parties with dear friends or family. At home, your guest list is also limited. Typically we cap out at 6 home hot pot guests—or if there are more, it’s often in increments of two to factor in the shared pots, burner equipment and seating / table arrangements lol.
Make sure you’ve also set aside a good chunk of time for hot pot! When I hot pot in a restaurant (which is often an all you can eat experience), I know it’s at minimum a two hour experience (could be longer, but I actually think most hot pot restaurants have two-hour dining limits now). At home, typically the same. We often pair some board games as an activity after home hot pot.
In terms of the tangible things you’ll need to create an at-home hot pot experience:
- A portable hot plate (electric / induction stove top or gas/propane)
- Stainless steel pots
- Plates, bowls, and other dishes to hold all of your ingredients
- Utensils like big and small spoons, chopsticks, etc.
- Hot pot soup base (can be bought in store, or ingredients to create your own hot pot broth)
- Sauces for your hot pot (chili oil, satay, soy sauce, chili sambal, etc.)
- Meats, seafoods, vegetables, and other ingredients (specific recommendations below)
Where Do You Buy Hot Pot Equipment and Ingredients?
Assembling everything you need for hot pot used to be a lot more work, but as of initially writing this post (2021), if you live in a city, it couldn’t be easier to find what you need for Home Hot Pot—especially if you know where to go!
In Edmonton for instance, Asian supermarket HMART literally has an entire section dedicated to hot pot, complete with various pre-made hot pot soup mixes, a variety of pre-cut (thinly sliced) meats, an assortment of seafood balls, vegetables, hot pot equipment (pots, spoons, portable stove tops), and more. You’ll find similar offerings at Edmonton’s TNT Supermarket or Lucky 97.
Kim Fat Market (Edmonton’s Chinatown) also has a lot of great hot pot items including hot pot kits you can order so if it’s you’re first time and it’s all feeling a bit overwhelming, they’ve got your back!
If you’re reading this beyond Edmonton, your best bet is to look for your city or town’s Asian grocery store. Though you can certainly get portable stove tops or hot plates from any number stores that sell kitchen appliances, and you can pick up most of the meat and vegetable ingredients at any grocery store, it just may not be pre-sliced the thin, hot pot way (but you can cut it yourself too).
You can also get almost all the equipment you need on Amazon, but I’d recommend your local shops first!
We got a lot of questions after I posted our New Year’s Eve Hot Pot about where we got our plates with sauce holders—those came from a fondue set we got years ago! So if you like something like that, search for fondue plates. Or, small side dishes to hold your sauces works just fine too.
What Hot Pot Ingredients Should You Get?
These ingredients below typically grace our Home Hot Pot, but is not the definitive list by any stretch. Your ingredient selection is really based on your own preferences and willingness to try new items too. When we hot pot with friends at homes we usually check if anyone has specific items they want (specific vegetables usually pop up), otherwise there are some standard items we always get.
You can refer to these other hot pot resources for more suggestions on hot pot ingredients:
- Omnivore’s Cookbook – Chinese Hot Pot Guide
- Serious Eats – Everything You Need To Know To Make Chinese Hot Pot at Home
But basically you’re going to want a selection of meat, seafood, vegetables, and noodles.
When Mike and I do Hot Pot at Home, we usually have these ingredients as part of our spread:
- Beef (a lot)
- Pork (a lot)
- Spam
- Shrimp
- Imitation Crab Sticks
- Mussels
- Fish Balls
- Beef Balls
- Bok choy
- Spinach
- Winter melon
- Enoki Mushrooms (or mixed mushrooms / any mushroom)
- Baby corn (I especially love sweet baby corn)
- Potatoes
- Bean Sprouts
- Udon Noodles
- Ramen Noodles
- Vermicelli Noodles
- Steamed White Rice
For broth, you can buy pre-made hot pot soup bases and sauces that just need to be added to boiling hot water or chicken broth for ease. There are additional flavours like mushroom, chicken, spicy beef, hot and sour, tomato, to name a few. If you are worried a soup base might be TOO spicy, just ease up on the amount of the packet you put in your pot.
Or you can really just create your own broth starting with hot water or chicken broth—then add your own preferred sauces. But the pre-made bases specifically designed for hot pot aren’t expensive so to keep it real easy, might as well just grab those!
A Few More Hot Pot Tips
Now here are a few other tips for your hot pot experience that are specific to my personal preference. Not all hot pot aficionados will agree with me, and maybe you won’t either but this is how I hot pot!
- Drink the broth!!!! It gets more and more delicious as your ingredients cook in it. Don’t waste the broth, I slurp it throughout my meal and if there is leftover broth, I save it to eat as leftover soup!
- Eat your hot pot with rice! This is perhaps one of the most controversial hot pot things I do within my friend group—many who see filling up on rice as a waste of stomach space when you’ve got meat and seafood to get in there lol, but as my mom always tells me, you’re never really full without a bowl of rice and in hot pot’s case, rice goes so well with your meat and seafood and it’s also excellent dipped in the hot pot broth! I often prefer my hot pot soup and meat/veg with rice over noodles (most people would choose noodles).
- I like to put sauces right in my broth as well as have sauces on the side to dip my cooked ingredients in too. Even if you’re using pre-made soup mixes, feel free to add additional favourite sauces, garlic, garnishes. If you’re using a basic chicken broth, absolutely add more sauces! In hot pot restaurants I used to buy the upgraded broth but after awhile it just made sense to get the chicken broth (included with your meal price) and level it up yourself using the provided free sauces.
- Mike’s ideal hot pot: all meat, nothing else lol. But I think you should be more adventurous than that! I prefer a balance of meat, seafood, vegetables and noodles / rice, but please consider experimenting to determine what your ideal hot pot is! Usually having hot pot in a restaurant with someone who has had it before allows you to more easily experiment and try different things since it’s all you can eat and you have someone showing you different things you could try. When you’re picking ingredients for home hot pot you are usually only picking ingredients you already like, but don’t be afraid to venture out of your comfort zone. Try a fish ball. Pick up a different type of noodle. Be adventurous!
- Consider cook times. You might be able to find recommended cook times for certain hot pot ingredients for your first go at it, but most hot pot meat is thinly sliced enough that they cook almost instantly in the boiling broth. Vegetables and noodles take a little longer to cook. Seafood I would also leave in a little longer just in case. If you take a bite into something and it doesn’t feel quite right, toss it back into your pot for a few more minutes! Over time and repeat hot pot experiences, you’ll get a better sense of how much time you need to cook your ingredients. Remember if you overpack your pot with stuff it’ll take longer for everything to cook so don’t do that lol. If your pot is also not boiling fast enough, covering briefly with a lid can help speed it up, and also pre-boiling water in a kettle or on your stove and then pouring into your hot pot can help speed up your boil/cooking too.
- On that same note, don’t use the same utensils to handle raw food as you do your cooked food! Make sure you use different utensils to pick up and place tour uncooked ingredients in your pot. Or you can use the other end of your chopsticks to handle raw (but I find just having separate utensils is easier so you don’t forget lol).
- Better to have leftovers than not enough food! Our general approach to eating, lol when you go to buy hot pot ingredients, don’t worry about whether you have *too* much food. In fact, when planning home hot pot, you should expect to have home hot pot for a few meals (if it’s not a big group eating). Leftovers are good! Just don’t waste the food. I would say over the years we have gotten a lot better at not over-buying ingredients so that what we buy is used up fairly well the evening of the initial hot pot and for subsequent leftover meals we are prepared for.
And if you’re looking for suggestions on where to have hot pot at a restaurant in Edmonton:
I love Chinese Hot Pot Buffet (huge selection of ingredients, high quality, slick looking dining room), Chili Hot Pot (they have a super cute robo cat that brings you ingredients but it is a bit snug/tight in terms of seating), and 97 Hot Pot in Chinatown, particularly 97 Hot Pot for their lunch hot pot deal which is unbeatable value and deliciousness with six items + your broth for $20. Liuyushou in Chinatown is also very high quality and delicious.
Also note if dining in for hot pot, most restaurants don’t do all you can eat for lunch time (you have to select a few items and choose your broth flavour, which I actually think is a great deal and you will be so full after too). All you can eat is typically only for dinner time, but note that not ALL hot pot restaurants offer all you can eat hot pot too (though that is my preferred restaurant hot pot).
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So that’s pretty much what you need to know to create a delicious Home Hot Pot experience!
There’s a lot I love about going to a hot pot restaurant versus cooking it at home (namely that it’s cheaper (all you can eat / buffet!) and you have more access to more ingredients and less waste/leftovers—but hosting hot pot at home is always a fun and tasty time, and a nice way to satisfy the hot pot cravings, because believe me, once you hot pot, you’ll get regular hot pot cravings lol. I’ve also done hot pot CAMPING! It’s really awesome, lol.
If you’ve had hot pot before, share your favourite ingredients or pro tips in the comments! If you’ve never tried hot pot, make 2021 (or whatever year it is when you read this post lol) the year you try.
Linda
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2 Comments
This is awesome, thanks! I bought my hot pot a couple of months ago and have been trying to use it more. Where did you get that white tray with the compartments?! That looks perfect for hot pot.
Great blog! Hoping to hold one for the holidays